Crown of Glory: Emperor's Edition

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

Crown of Glory Emperor's Edition (COG:EE) is  the second sequel to the original Crown of Glory. Sadly the improvements although they’re promising at first glance turn out to be mostly minor, and one or two major things are now just plain broken as well.

It’s not about the economy (stupid)

Gone by default is the crazy pseudo economic game that so spoiled  the original COG, where players had to waste their time building mills & other generic “strategy” game improvements in their provinces, & waste yet more time trading the wine & corn & handful of other generic “strategy” game goods that resulted from this. It’s not how any nineteenth century economy worked, and it’s not a good model of anything other than how production & trade get handled in the mass market “strategy” games (that so richly deserve those annoying mocking air quotes that I seem unable to resist). 

You can still turn the mock economy on as an option, but I didn’t, and frankly don’t understand why anyone would.  It’s not a question of detail, or of the rules being advanced, so much as it’s a matter of the rules being stupid and rather than adding anything to play, how they manage to substantially subtract from it. (I cannot say enough bad things about the economic game in the original COG, but you don’t want to read it, and I don’t much want to write it, so please let’s both imagine several more paragraphs that heap abuse on it and we’ll move on.)

With the mock economy out of the way you do get a good chance to look into the details of the rest of the game. This is great. Except unfortunately it turns out the rest of the game has some fairly daft rules too.

What’s different? What’s new?

The new map’s a bit different; there’s the turnings off of the <expletive> economy game I’ve already mentioned one or two thousand times; there’re a few more scenarios & events; and there are a few more screens that somehow manage to look quite bolted on.

For example there’s a diplomatic overview screen now. This screen could have been good, it’s a map of Europe with pictures of the leaders with lines in between them indicating whether they're friends or foes.  Except no effort seems to have been made to line up the pictures of the leaders with their appropriate geographical orientation to one another, so it’s left with the impression of being an afterthought rather than an improvement.

And … ummm … Other than that I’m left scratching my head, it looks like not a lot else has changed in the main game, but …

A grand strategy game with extra extraneous tactical fiddly bits

Like the original COG this game is still weighed down with a tactical land combat game that players can use to resolve the combats that arise in the main game, should they choose to, and to that’s been added a new but very similar tactical naval game.

Apart from dragging the length of the game out to unmanageable proportions I never really saw much point to this. For me tactical sub games usually only work in a game like the old Avalon Hill boardgame Titan, where there really wasn’t anything very much going on in the main game. (In Titan there was choosing your path around a circular board, and that was pretty much it). So I was always of the opinion that the strategy game didn’t need the tactical game, and should really be able to stand up on its own merits, and also that the tactical game might well be improved mightily if allowed to go its own way too. That opinion hasn’t changed.

One of my main criticisms of the original game was that while it had everything and the kitchen sink thrown in, it didn’t do any of those things particularly well. It seems these guys just can’t let go of enough of the dud parts of their first brush designs. Once they think of it - it’s in, and it stays in. More trimming rather than more trimmings is what’s still badly needed here. Less would most certainly be more. They’ve made a start with the economics subgame, now it’s time for a few more cuts. Chop chop.

As far as I can tell the land tactical game is still pretty much the same one it used to be. Having a combat brings up a hex grid of generic wooded land, or mountain, or whatever the case may be. Units are the counters you’d expect on a hex map, so they all have the same footprint on the map, and somehow as is usually the case a few hundred men take up the same space as several thousand men in a game without stacking. So perhaps for tactical think small scale operational. But with facings. And formations. And other small tactical considerations, like: why can’t I change my initial setup, or more importantly: why is there an objective in a lake …

There’s unrealised potential here – all the elements of quite a good game in itself are present (misinterpreted orders, changing formations, as well of course as all the usual terrain considerations), but the interface is really clumsy. You can only move one unit at a time in a forced order (presumably some sort of index order). If this game could be hived off the main one & improved it might go somewhere. As it is there’s the option to fight at brigade level too, which gives you the same sized map but with even more units that can’t stack. But that’s just plain weird, and that’s all that’s been added that I can see.

As it is you can’t leap straight into playing a tactical game like you can in many of  the mainstream “strategy” games, battles arise in the main game or not at all. There’re no quick battles, nor any historical ones. Both of which would be have been nice.

There’s also a limit to how many units can appear in the tactical game (both the quick resolution version & the tactical map version), which is awfully reminiscent of those other “strategy” games’ twenty a side combats, which gets to me too.  If I put a hundred units in Vienna I want the game to act like there might have been some point to my decision. But no.

The naval game is similar.  Very similar in fact – it’s quite obviously a derivative of the land combat game, right down to telling you how many men were killed on each side at the end of a battle, but not telling you anything about how many ships were lost, captured, or damaged. It’d be nice to know.

The ships themselves are pretty generic. There are big ones & small ones and all sorts of type names are there, but they’re just slight variations in crew & damage numbers, the scale seems wrong to have much scope here for early nineteenth century naval strategy. Trafalgar can’t happen for a start, not only were there probably too many ships involved, but there’s not really enough of a distinction between the lighter but more disciplined Brits & the clumsily handled Spanish giants, and to cap it all off the tactical map is just way too small – There’s no real possibility of manoeuvre when one side occupies all one side of a  map and the other side all of the other from the start of an engagement. And there’s no real point to crossing the T any way when you can pretty much always move a hex and change direction, when speed & rigging seem unrelated, when there are no formations, & when you can stop dead in the water by the simple expedient of passing after you fire, rather than moving on. As for Hornblower-esque combats where the plucky sixth-rater Atropos struggles with the Dons while avoiding the ire of their shore batteries ... forget about it. There’s land, but I didn’t see any forts.

You can easily choose to pass on the detailed battles, on land and at sea, and concentrate on the core of the game – the strategic game. So for me the tactical shenanigans are merely icing on the cake.  COG:EE game stands or falls on the strength of its strategic game.

The bulk of that strategic game is actually pretty good, which is why it took me quite a few plays to make my mind up about it, but it’s let down badly in one or two areas that really spoil the whole thing. You can manoeuvre & concentrate appropriately, and while a little clumsy the interface is OK. (I’d like to be able to take back more than just my last action, but I can live within that limitation, and if that was the worst problem the game had it would be a fine game in my book.)  But judged by the strength of the strategic game the game still falls down, because …

Sing me a song, a song of supply

Supply doesn’t work. For a grand strategy game about a war where the turning point was the Grande Armée finding itself at the very end of a tenuous supply line in Moscow this is simply unfathomable. If there’s anything a Napoleonic strategy game should handle it’s supply. You’d think. But no.

IN COG:EE once a chain of supply depots is up & running any city along its path with keep it going. The supply line has to be started off in friendly territory (the French side of the Russian border, say) but once supply is flowing it doesn’t really matter if that link to friendly territory (and you know, the source of the supply) ends up being cut.  Any city along its path will keep the supply pumping.  Any city.  Including the city at what’s meant to be the receiving end of the supply line. So if the French set up a supply line to Moscow for example, it doesn’t matter if those dastardly Cossacks cut it, cause now the supply can flow the other way: From cut off Moscow to everywhere else along the supply route.

This kills the game as any sort of serious wargame for me. Fixing supply would get this game a second star, but without a fix I can’t call the results I’m seeing in any way historical. And don’t hold your breath for a fix, according to discussions on Usenet & on the Matrix forum it seems they did this on purpose.

And the AI just did what?

Sadly the AI is borderline insane. It seems to occasionally get things right, like lunging at Vienna as the French in the opening game, but only presumably because things like that are scripted somewhere; most of the time it doesn’t seem to understand which war it’s fighting. As the Austrians, Prussians & Russians it’s much more keen to pick off weaker members of its own coalition than fighting the French.  These guys should be seething with arch-conservative Ancien Regime rage at the Corsican upstart, but instead they’d happily chuck that fight in in exchange for one more province carved off one of their once & future allies.

Similarly something needs to be done about the boundless naval ambitions of Russia & Turkey in this game.  They’re land powers, but they don’t seem to have got that memo. Turkey was boxed in by Venice (Venice!), but if it ever did break out into the wider Med, or if for some crazy reason Russia were to up stakes & abandon the frozen Baltic, I’m pretty sure neither of them should ever, no matter how things transpired on land, ever, ever be fighting for control of the English Channel in 1812.  No, no, no.

A gateway game?

COG:EE neatly highlights one of the many problems with the ‘gateway wargame’ theory, which by way of a quick summary I can say takes its name from the equally implausible gateway drug theory.  “So you tried click & twitch strategy game X, but found it not quite realistic enough?  Well, why not try wargame Y”, we should be able to say.  Except that there often isn’t a directly comparable wargame Y to point to, and when there is it’s often not one that’s any good. Which is the case here.

That’s a pity, because there’s got to be more than one teenager playing Empire Total War right now who’ll get tired of the spinning tops that make up his navy & the Olympic sprinters who make up his army. And the leap from the the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries is small enough for this game to have qualified nicely for the role of gateway game. If only it had been any good. Better hope for a realism mod for ETW instead.

The future?

The original Crown Of Glory started out as a buggy mess, it barely stayed running long enough to see what was wrong with it, but it was patched repeatedly and I believe more or less successfully. (I don’t know that for sure, I gave up on downloading the patches. It’s supposed to have stayed running at least.) So I wouldn’t be surprised if this game gets patched extensively too. Whether or not the patches fix what ails it though, well only time will tell.